tbpf

gga

I was a private IT contractor when I lived in Canberra where the vast
majority of the work was for government departments. At the time of
writing this, I was working on a team called Revenue Re-engineering at
the Australian Quarantine and Inspection Service. A friend asked me
what "Revenue Re-engineering" did, and the below was my response.
Before you go getting all upset and start sending me threatening
e-mails and letter bombs, remember that this is my private corner of
the world where I get to rant about everything I see as wrong. I may
disagree with the way government does things, even when it's the
department or team I am working on, but if the direction is set out in
legislation (as it is in the below case) then I have no right to
interfere in my capacity as an AQIS employee. For better or worse the
government is the elected representation of the people and the public
service is just here to provide advice and then implement the policies
of that government.
If I want things to change, then I am free
to vote
in elections and lobby members and senators. Until things change
however, I will continue to rant and rave here.

AQIS is funded almost entirely
by industry. When an inspector checks an importer’s food and denies
entrance because the food is full of BSE and Foot and Mouth, the
importer is charged for the inspection. In fact, everytime some
service is provided by AQIS to industry the company is directly
charged.

Your average pig farmer has now got it into his tiny little mind that
because he’s paying AQIS to run it’s services, then every cent he
spends on AQIS is only going to be spent on himself or other
tiny-brained pig farmers, not the accursed evil beef farmers down the
road. Damn them and their evil beef ways!

Currently AQIS collects this money in a ‘random’ way. The tiny-brained
pig farmer pays or doesn’t pay, his choice, and AQIS notices, or
doesn’t notice. (So I ask you, who really is tiny-brained?) Revenue
re-engineering is about changing the way AQIS collects the money from
industry. Our first attempt was some software that’ll supposedly make
it easier to track. If that doesn’t work, we’re hiring some large
Maori guys, and I’m sure they’ll be very efficient.

The whole project shouldn’t exist. The inspector who goes out is an
expert in beating up flowers to find any bugs, they have science
degrees and know a hell of a lot about botany, entomology and the
like. Filling in all this paperwork to collect money off the TBPF is
way outside his expertise, and he hates having to do it. There’s this
little government agency in a couple of buildings in Canberra called
the Australian Taxation Office. They’re really good at getting money
off people, you could say that’s all they do. Instead of this user
pays rubbish, the ATO should just be taxing industry directly, we
could even provide data feeds so they knew how many times each
importer had imported something and tax off that.

Right now, the TBPF gives us $100 and insists that $50 of that be torn
in administration fees to be sure that the other $50 only gets spent
on him and other TBPFs, rather than see $25 go to chicken farmers,
even if $75 would then go to the TBPFs.

And let’s take a step back here. There’s a name for this form of
government spending: “User Pays.” Some people will never be convinced
of the moral and ethical reasons why “User Pays” is a Bad Idea, but
here we have a nice solid economic rationalist reason. From the
inside, it’s a waste of money. The extraordinary expense in
identifying which particular dollar needs to be spent on which
particular program is pretty incredible. Consolidated revenue people,
it just makes more sense.